Evening 2: Morton’s – steak, steak, steak

Evening 3: Kokkari – nothing but Greek

Evening 4: The Slanted Door – Asian Fusion like no other

Evening 5: The Cheesecake Factory – something for everyone!

“you guys are a cheap money making scheme. anybody who comes to you is either blind and cant make a mii, or slightly retarded. its extremely easy to make a mii, i made one in 10 minutes flat. why would someone pay 10 worthless dollars for a stupid mii. i hope you go bankrupt”

Although I probably shouldn’t be surprised any more, it stuns me a little that people would actually take the time to write and submit such a comment.  It serves absolutely no purpose, and brings absolutely no value to anyone – except perhaps the sender, who has so little self-esteem that the only way they can feel good about themselves is by making other people feel bad.  What a way to live.

What’s sad is that the minds of these kinds of people are so closed.  Had this person done a little more research, they would have learned that Wii owners are only 50% of the customers seeking “designer Miis”.  Creating a pet-project service has helped us discover new business opportunities, further allowing us to bring value to those who seek it.  That’s more than I can say what the author of this message brought to the online community.

For those who are curious, we’ve made enough to pay at least two month’s rent in Tokyo – an amount anyone in their right mind would agree isn’t bad for a project that consumes just a few hours on the weekend.

On to my analysis!

PingMag

… does a good job finding and comparing Japanese web 2.0 services to their U.S. counterparts. For social networking, the U.S. has MySpace while Japan has Mixi. I should add that since the article was posted, Mixi has IPO’d in Japan to a tune of $1.9 billion. And remarkably, as I mentioned before, there hasn’t been much coverage overseas. For the second-fiddle Facebook, in Japan we have Gree.

The video-sharing space has been interesting to watch as it is perhaps the first time a U.S. service has become dominant in Japan. Typically the language barrier has been a stop-gap for many businesses trying to enter this country, but YouTube’s ease of use and multi-lingual support (in the comments, for example) has been a boon for its popularity here and an example of how one might succeed without investing time and resources into localizing the interface. As long as the need is great – and for YouTube in Japan’s case, it was very much so – the Japanese and their rather hilarious mastery of English can overcome any obstacles. We likely will not be seeing a viable competitor sprout from Japan for legal and political reasons, so expect YouTube to gain exposure here as we move forward.

I’m personally not all that familiar with podcasting services, but for the Odeo and Podcast Alley users out there, Japan’s very own ZapZap may be of interest – especially since it’s one of the few web 2.0 services aspiring to appeal to both the English and the Japanese community. If nothing else, at least the design seems to indicate an appreciation for “web 2.0-yness” :P

37signals’ Ta-da Lists is mentioned as a productivity-enhancing web platform, and from Japan the article mentions Orchestrate – which is a fun implementation, but the author isn’t exactly sharing objectively (Orchestrate is his personal project). There is however a fascinating project in beta form (what isn’t?!) called CheckPad. You can tell CheckPad is clearly targeting the Japanese market with their focused integration of mobile devices.

The U.S. / Japan web 2.0 services comparison gets interesting as we enter the blog-buzz aggregation arena – from the U.S. we have Technorati, and from Japan, Kizasi. Kizasi is less encumbered by senseless adds and provides a clear, focused representation of its purpose – to show what’s hot in the blogosphere, now. Technorati does a better job of promoting the blogs, while Kizasi is more focused on the subject matter across them.

Lastly, there’s a dearth of comparable news aggregation sites provided by the Japan web-centric community. While the U.S. has Digg and TechCrunch, TechCrunchHQ apparently caught a waft of opportunity and has opened their own service here – TechCrunch Japan. Japan Entry is a big challenge for most industries, and usually requires partnering with a Japanese firm in order to build reputation and respect with the client base. But the web-space may prove to be different as it’s a younger domain and new services are more quickly experimented with and adopted by a younger demographic.

The PingMag article never mentions web 2.0 poster-child photo-sharing site Flickr, but team Japan has its own contribution to this space with Zorg, which aspires to be more for the professional demographic (although I think Flickr appeals to them quite well already). Zorg is still relatively new and actively hiring!

Read/Write Web

… has a more recent article in the style of an interview with Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners). There are some good statistics throughout on some of the services mentioned also in the PingMap post, and a good discussion to give readers a sense of the unique challenges web 2.0 projects face in growing in Japan. Overall Yahoo’s dominance is felt very strongly here as culturally the Japanese are wary to try new things, but Masashi notes that recently Yahoo is struggling as engineers move to develop newer and more entrepreneurial services such as social bookmarking site Hatena and SNS Gree.

There’s a good discussion towards the end on the maturing of Japan’s web-space, its strong online advertising market, its hot IPO market, and the reasons behind the dominance of mobile platforms.

Technorati Tags: japan, web2.0

I’ve read a few concerned pieces now that Shinzo Abe is the new prime minister for Japan (and note how he got there – it sure wasn’t through a democratic process). He’s not exactly known for his pro-gaijin views, but at least on the technology side I think we can expect some momentum in the positive moves with the recent Mixi IPO and Blackberry arrival. Both are non-Japanese ideas sure to inspire the hunt for further ideas off the island. It’s premature to make any calls and besides, nothing changes faster than the speed of a tortise around here anyways. But I’m getting a pretty good vibe on Japan’s younger demographic and their acceptance and adoption of internet (not just mobile!) technologies in general.

Some trustees’ concern was aroused when they learned that Mrs. Gee was using marijuana at the mansion. The chancellor told some trustees she was using it for an inner-ear ailment.

Sounds like Mrs. Gee is the one who should have been chancellor of Brown!

Mrs. Gee has caused stirs on campus with her liberal politics. She lowered the American flag outside Braeburn [their residence in Vanderbilt] to half-staff after President Bush won re-election in 2004 … She and others signed a letter of protest to the chancellor when Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, was invited to address graduating students in 2004 … Mrs. Gee posted the letter on the couple’s refrigerator door at Braeburn.

But seriously, I think Brown is very fortunate (and better off!) to have Ruth Simmons, and I hope she stays for a long time.

Well, I just watched the season premier of NBC’s new show Heroes, and I think I have an idea (*gasp*!) One of the characters is a typical Japanese salaryman who has the unique ability to alter the space/time divide. In introducing this character, he starts off in Tokyo trying to convince a colleague of his abilities – and the dialog is ear-piercingly annoying! Okay, to be fair the main Japanese character isn’t so bad, but boy his colleague … do the Japanese a favor and stick to English! The most annoying is when this colleague tries to say English names (a reference to “Star Trek” and “Spock”, for example) with the Japanese accent – but since his Japanese is already funky, the faux accent renders a completely incomprehensible aural burp.

It’s sad – more for the Japanese, since most viewers probably couldn’t care less. For them I imagine just seeing images of Shibuya and Tokyo are fascinating. Still, since Hollywood can’t seem to find Japanese who can speak English, it’d be nice if they at least used native Japanese speakers for real Japanese dialog…

Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. Faggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks are learning that Jesusland doesn’t even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it’s all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her clit pierced? Jesus is just fucking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you’ll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you’ll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded … all you have to do is die, and then it’s SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service.

The Day the Enlightenment Went Out

Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values – critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed “a candid world,” as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush’s supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs – as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.

Has 200 years of history shown that the American ‘experiment’ is a failure?

Gays have no rights? Christians fundamentalists should have no rights, we sure don’t need anymore of them procreating. The traditional institution of marriage (between a man and woman) is so ludicrously corrupt in the US anyway, what level of hypocrisy does it take for these idiots to claim that they are somehow protecting marriage by denying gays the right to sign prenups, have shotgun weddings in vegas, get divorced, and argue over who gets the beamer?

Think the war in Iraq was right and just? Think the war on terror is effective? Do you understand that this non-sense has been going on since the middle ages? Is killing people a good way to make friends and earn respect? Has Israel achieved anything using the same tactics? The USA isn’t an innocent victim.

For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the “blue” states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation’s leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values.

Booya.